In looking back upon his mood of that earlier day, he saw himself as an incredibly ignorant and careless man; marvelled at the lightness of heart which had enabled him to find amusement in rambling over this vast slaughter-strewn field of battle.

Picturesque, forsooth! Where was its picturesqueness for that struggling, soon-to-be-defeated tradesman, with his tipsy wife, and band of children who looked to him for bread?
"And I myself am crushing the man--as surely as if I had my hand on his gullet and my knee on his chest! Crush him I must; otherwise, what becomes of that little home down at St.Neots--dear to me as his children are to him.
There's no room for both of us; he has come too near; he must pay the penalty of his miscalculation.

Is there not the workhouse for such people ?" And Will went about repeating to himself.

"There's the workhouse--don't I pay poor-rates ?--the workhouse is an admirable institution." He lay awake many an hour of these winter nights, seeing in vision his own life and the life of man.

He remembered the office in Little Ailie Street; saw himself and Godfrey Sherwood sitting together, talking, laughing, making a jest of their effort to support a doomed house.
Godfrey used to repeat legends, sagas, stories of travel, as though existence had not a care, or the possibility of one; and he, in turn, talked about some bit of London he had been exploring, showed an old map he had picked up, an old volume of London topography.